Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The Disney series had tapped into this headlong dash toward the future and inflamed the imagination of Americans in much the same way that the writings of Hermann Oberth and the films of Fritz Lang had ignited the amateur rocketry craze in Germany in the late 1920s that eventually produced the V-2. But the space craze that swept the nation in the mid-1950s did not translate into political support for space programs. Lawmakers had more earthbound and immediate concerns. Space was the distant domain of dreamers and science fiction writers.

  Until 1954, cumulative federal spending on satellite research in the United States amounted to $88,000. And even this sum was thought excessive. When von Braun that same year offered to launch a satellite using a modified Redstone missile for less than $100,000, his request for the additional funding was flatly denied. If money was any indication of political interest, satellite and space exploration did not even register on radar screens in the nation’s capital until 1955, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences announced that it would try to send a craft into orbit as part of the planned International Geophysical Year. (The pledge was meaningless, however, until Khrushchev and the Presidium got on board the following year.)

  The IGY was a science Olympics of sorts that had its origins in the nineteenth-century Arctic exploration races. Held every fifty years to encourage scientific exchange on the physical properties of the polar regions, it had expanded its brief to cover the planet’s skies, oceans, and ice caps. A few weeks prior to the IGY’s 1955 convention in Rome, which set July 1, 1957, as the start of the next Geophysical Year, Radio Moscow announced that the Soviet Union would launch scientific instruments into space to measure such phenomena as solar radiation and cosmic rays. In response, the National Academy of Sciences promptly declared that the United States would also send up a satellite to study the earth’s protective cocoon. “The atmosphere of the earth acts as a huge shield against many types of radiation and objects that are found in outer space,” the academy press release stated, somewhat dryly. “In order to acquire data that are presently unavailable, it is most important that scientists be able to place instruments outside the earth’s atmosphere in such a way that they can make continuing records about the various properties about which information is desired.”

  Behind the seemingly benign facade of the announcements, both the United States and the Soviet Union had ulterior motives for participating in the IGY. Each was looking for a peaceful, civilian excuse to test the military potential of its hardware—how air drag, gravitational fields, and ion content could affect missile trajectories; how the ionosphere affected communications; how orbital decay worked; and so on. There was another, equally important consideration: a research satellite blessed by the international scientific community would set the precedent for an “open skies” policy where sovereign airspace did extend beyond the stratosphere. This, more than anything, argued James Killian at the Office of Defense Mobilization, justified the military’s support for the IGY program.

  Killian was among only a handful of people in Washington in 1955 who grasped the true significance of a satellite. Engine Charlie Wilson was not one of them. Killian said that the secretary of defense displayed a “narrowly limited understanding” of the new technology and balked at backing the project. Eventually a compromise was struck in which Congress allocated $13 million—roughly the cost of two B-52 bombers—for America’s entry into the space race. The funding was hopelessly inadequate, and Nelson A. Rockefeller, another Eisenhower adviser, urged that the administration take satellites more seriously. “I am impressed,” he wrote in a widely circulated memorandum, “by the costly consequences of allowing the Russian initiative to outrun ours through an achievement that will symbolize scientific and technological advancement to people everywhere. The stake of prestige that is involved makes this a race we cannot afford to lose.” The “unmistakable relationship,” Rockefeller added ominously, “to intercontinental ballistic missile technology might have important repercussions on the political determination of free world countries to resist communist threats.”

  But Eisenhower didn’t bite. For him, nuclear bombers were a sufficient stick to keep the Soviets in line. Khrushchev’s secret speech, in fact, would be interpreted by the CIA as proof that the existing American doctrine was working. “It must be restated, and it cannot be emphasized too strongly,” the CIA said of Khrushchev’s break with Stalinism, “that recognition by the Soviet leaders of the significance of nuclear weapons is the underlying cause for their policy shift. For the present, the atom and jet are the basic deterrent.”

  Bombers had actually scared the Kremlin into softening its stand—“mellowing,” as the agency put it. Satellites, therefore, were trivial in the superpower rivalry. Eisenhower declared that he felt no need “to compete with the Soviets in this area.” Secretary Wilson told the New York Times that he too was unconcerned about the prospect of Russia reaching space first. “I wouldn’t care if they did,” he said.

  5

  DESERT FIRES

  The R-7’s rescheduled March 1957 test-launch deadline came and went, and Sergei Korolev was still not ready. He was becoming increasingly irritable, more prone to terrorizing his staff with his infamous flare-ups, and he wielded both the stick and the carrot to motivate his engineers. Breakthroughs were rewarded with on-the-spot bonuses, wads of rubles that Korolev kept in an office safe for just such a purpose. The most significant achievements earned holidays to Black Sea resorts or even the most sought-after commodity in the entire Soviet Union: the keys to a new apartment. Like all large factories and institutes, OKB-1 was responsible for housing its employees. For young and especially newlywed scientists living in dormitories without privacy, few incentives matched the prospect of skipping to the front of the long waiting list for a place of their own.

  The capitalist approach was paying dividends, as glitches were progressively ironed out. Valentin Glushko had wanted no part in making modifications to the steering thrusters, so they were completed in-house at OKB-1. The addition of the tiny directional thrusters also solved the problem of postimpulse boost; the R-7’s main engines could now be shut down a fraction of a second early to compensate for residual propellant, while the little thrusters could be fired to adjust speed and position at the critical aiming, or “sweet,” point, as guidance specialists called cutoff.

  A backup radio-controlled radar guidance system was also installed to augment the accuracy of the onboard inertial gyroscopes. Boris Chertok supervised the duplicate system, which had involved building nine tracking stations deep in the Kazakh desert over the first 500 miles of the R-7’s trajectory route, and another six stations within a 90-mile approach to the target area in the Kamchatka Peninsula, 4,000 miles farther. As the missile would fly over the first nine stations, radar would pick it up, plot whether it was on course, and send back telemetry signals for any needed adjustments to trim, yaw, or pitch in what essentially was a very large and costly version of amateur modelers flying radio-controlled airplanes. But with the R-7, the action would unfold at speeds in excess of 17,000 miles per hour and span many time zones in a matter of minutes.

  With the R-7 now capable of guided flight, Korolev’s team solved the problem of how to support its crushing weight during liftoff. Their solution was ingeniously simple. A gigantic vise with collapsible jaws, pivots, and counterweights was built in Moscow and tested at a military shipyard in Leningrad—the only place with cranes big enough to lift the R-7. When the rocket was lowered into this vise, its 283-ton mass forced the jaws to squeeze shut, like the petals of a tulip. As the rocket rose after ignition, relieving the load from the clamped jaws, the hinged counterweights at the end of the petals exerted downward force, releasing the vise grip.

  On the other hand, concerns about the R-7’s nose cone persisted throughout the winter and spring of 1957. After much experimentation, the warhead receptacles were blunted and shortened to reduce drag, while an ablative material that used a combination of silica and asbestum with texta
lyte was selected for the heat shield. The reentry problem, as Korolev would discover, was far from licked, but by late April the Chief Designer felt sufficiently confident that he moved his entire operation to the secret facility that had been built for the R-7 in Kazakhstan to finally take the ICBM out for its long-delayed test flight.

  Originally known as Tyura-Tam and eventually as Baikonur (in yet another instance of Soviet misdirection), the installation was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Soviet Union. Correspondence to it was simply addressed to Moscow Post Office Box 300, and it figured on no map. The military construction crews that had built it had been rotated in short, highly compartmentalized shifts, and never told what they were doing in the middle of the broiling Kazakh desert, where temperatures soared to 135 degrees in summer and plunged to 35 below in the short, merciless winter. Dust storms clogged machinery with salty sand particles blown across the central Asian steppe from the Aral Sea. For hundreds of miles, there was not a single tree to offer shade or firewood. Soldiers slept in tents crawling with scorpions, and water had to be trucked in.

  Besides the benefit of seclusion, the Tyura-Tam site had been selected because of the R-7’s guidance problems. Tracking stations could be built in the depopulated area along the route to Siberia, and rocket engineers didn’t have to worry about spent boosters falling on urban centers. A major rail spur also happened to run nearby, easing the transport of missile parts and building materials. The pace of construction at Tyura-Tam had been so frenetic, so filled with accidents and setbacks, that the young military officer responsible for erecting the Soviet Union’s first nuclear ICBM launch site had gone crazy and been carted away to a psychiatric ward. Only the rudimentary infrastructure had been completed in time for testing: a huge assembly hangar connected by rail to a fire pit the size of a large quarry to absorb the flames at liftoff; several underground propellant storage tanks; a cement bunker blockhouse; and a 15,000-square-foot launch platform erected out of sixteen massive bridge trusses. Otherwise, and in every direction, there were only shifting dunes and the shimmering heat waves of the sun reflecting off the sand. There had been no time to build housing, cafeterias, recreation halls, laboratories, or even lavatories. Scientists lived four to a compartment in train cars that had been built in East Germany after the war and equipped with special labs for the storage and testing of delicate rocket components. Showers were a rare luxury. The food was gritty and abysmal. And at night the principal form of entertainment seemed to involve watching scorpions duel to the death in empty vodka bottles.

  Ill omens appeared almost from the start. During a dress rehearsal for the first launch, a fire alarm was inadvertently triggered, setting off sprinklers in the blockhouse control room that drenched everyone, including irate military representatives who had come to observe the birth of the Red Army’s latest and most lethal weapon. Later, a technician dropped a bolt inside the R-7, and for several tense hours the missile was searched for the lost object. Korolev exploded when Chertok informed him that one of the Moscow dignitaries had offered the clumsy technician a bonus of 250 rubles—about a week’s pay—for owning up to the potentially catastrophic mishap. “What the hell are you doing?” the Chief Designer roared. “You should punish him, not reward him. Rescind the bonus immediately and issue a reprimand.”

  As the May 15 countdown neared, tension grew. A few hours before liftoff, Korolev blew up at another military observer, Colonel Alexander Maksimov, who he thought was sending false reports about leaky liquid oxygen feed lines to his superiors. “Get him out of here right now, or I’m aborting,” Korolev shouted. Only it turned out that Maksimov was innocent, and Korolev had to apologize publicly. Any leaky valves had been fixed; Korolev’s head of testing, the equally crotchety Leonid Voskresenskiy—the only person among the thousands of NII-88 and OKB-1 employees permitted to address Sergei Korolev by his first name, without the formal patronymic—had a decidedly low-tech method for dealing with leaks. He would wrap his cap over the faulty valve and urinate on it. The minus-297-degree liquid oxygen would freeze the urine on contact, sealing the leak.

  The rocket was cleared for liftoff just after 7:00 PM MOSCOW time on May 15. The massive engines fired, the Tulip launch stand worked perfectly, and the R-7 rose to the whooping cheers of assembled engineers and VIPs. But ninety-eight seconds into the flight something went terribly wrong. The missile crashed, scattering debris over a 250-mile radius.

  Back in Moscow, Sergei Khrushchev recalled the phone ringing after dinner at the family’s mansion in Lenin Hills. It was the white line, the German-made phone used for important government business. “That was Korolev,” said Nikita Khrushchev, looking particularly gloomy as he hung up. “They launched the R-7 this evening. Unfortunately it was unsuccessful.”

  Korolev, though, was upbeat. First launches almost always failed. That had been the rule with the R-l, the R-2, and the R-5. And he had reason to feel optimistic: for the first minute and a half, the R-7 had performed flawlessly. The trouble had been with one of the peripheral boosters, block D, which had caught fire shortly before separation. The suspected cause of the explosion was excessive vibrations, what was known as the Pogo effect. Korolev and his team would figure out exactly what had happened and fix the glitch. Next time, he was certain, his missile would make it all the way to the target zone in Kamchatka, almost 5,000 miles away on Siberia’s Pacific coast.

  For a long, hot month, they tinkered. At last, on June 9, another R-7 was wedged into the Tulip launch stand. Voskresenskiy supervised all the preparations. Korolev trusted him implicitly, and on more than one occasion he had proven his loyalty and courage. Once, when a launch had misfired and the live warhead had been dislodged from its missile, dangling precariously over the pad, everyone had frozen in panic. But Voskresenskiy had calmly told Korolev, “Give me a crane, some cash, five men of my choosing, and three hours.” With wads of vodka-walking-around money bulging out of their pockets, Voskresenskiy’s men safely dismantled the one-ton warhead, after which they got royally drunk.

  Like a great many test pilots and other people who push safety envelopes for a living, Voskresenskiy was deeply superstitious. So when the next R-7 failed to start, not once, not twice, but on three consecutive days before sputtering out with a smoky cough on the launchpad on June 11, Voskresenskiy decided it was cursed. “Take it away,” he ordered. “I never want to see it again.” The blighted rocket was hauled away in disgrace.

  A dark, defeated mood settled over the exhausted R-7 team. They hadn’t seen their families in several months. They were working round the clock, seven days a week, and people were getting sick from the long hours and unremitting worry. Chertok came down with a strange ailment with similar symptoms to radiation poisoning. Eventually he would have to be medically evacuated to Moscow. Korolev developed strep throat and had to take frequent penicillin shots. His health had never fully recovered from the ravages of the camps, and he frequently took ill. “We are working under a great strain, both physical and emotional,” he wrote his second wife, Nina. “Everyone feels a bit sick. I want to hug you and forget about all this stress.”

  Korolev had met Nina Kotenkova at OKB-1, where she served as the institute’s English-language specialist, translating Western scientific periodicals. It was through her that the Chief Designer had kept abreast of Wernher von Braun’s writings and exploits in the American media, and in the flush of lonely nights spent jointly hunched over the pages of Popular Mechanics they had fallen in love. Korolev had still been married to his first wife, Ksenia, when they had met, and their affair had led to a bitter divorce and estrangement from his teenage daughter, Natalia, who for years refused to see him and would never agree to speak to Nina.

  From his monastic hut at Tyura-Tam, a cabin without running water and only a bare lightbulb to illuminate the lonely gloom, Korolev wrote his daughter weekly, begging for her forgiveness. He tried calling on her twenty-first birthday, but she hung up on him. “It hurts me so much,” he told Nin
a.

  Even at the best of times, Tyura-Tam was a dispiriting place. But with two consecutive failures, growing friction between the different design bureaus over responsibility for the myriad malfunctions, and Moscow becoming increasingly irritated, the atmosphere was downright foreboding as Korolev lined up a third R-7 for launch on July 12. This time the countdown went uninterrupted, the engines all fired properly, and the missile lifted off without a hitch at 3:53 PM. Thirty-three seconds later it disintegrated. The strap-on peripheral boosters had separated early.

  Watching the four flaming boosters slowly sail down into the desert just four humiliating miles from the launchpad, Korolev dejectedly shook his head. “We are criminals,” he said. “We just burned away [the financial equivalent of] an entire town.”

  Fear now descended on the despondent scientists. The Soviet Union was not so far removed from the Stalinist era to presume that punishment might not be meted out for the catastrophic and costly failures. “What can they do to us?” a frightened Chertok asked Konstantin Rudnev, the deputy minister of armaments. “They are not going to jail us, or send us to Kolyma?”